The Perfect Storm

trawl and both men were thrown into the water. Devine managed to clamber back into the boat, but Lee, weighed down by boots and winter clothing, started to sink. He was several fathoms under when his hand touched the trawl line that led back up to the surface. He started to pull.

Almost immediately his right hand sunk into a hook. He jerked it away, leaving part of his finger on the barbed steel like a piece of herringbait, and kept pulling upwards towards the light. He finally broke the surface and heaved himself back into the dory. It was almost awash and Devine, who was bailing like mad, could do nothing to help him. Lee passed out from the pain and when he came to, he grabbed a bucket and started bailing as well. They had to empty the boat before they were hit by another freak wave. Twenty minutes later they were out of danger and Devine asked Lee if he needed to go back to the schooner. Lee shook his head and said that they should finish hauling the trawls. For the next hour he pulled gear out of the water with his mangled hand. That was dory fishing in its heyday.

There are worse deaths than the one Lee almost suffered, though. Warm Gulf Stream water meets the Labrador Current over the Grand Banks, and the result is a wall of fog that can sweep in with no warning at all. Dory crews hauling their gear have been caught by the fog and simply never seen again. In 1883, a fisherman named Howard Blackburn—still a hero in town, Gloucester’s answer to Paul Bunyan—was separated from his ship and endured three days at sea during a January gale. His dorymate died of exposure, and Blackburn had to freeze his own hands around the oar handles to continue rowing for Newfoundland. In the end he lost all his fingers to frostbite. He made land on a deserted part of the coast and staggered around for several days before finally being rescued.

Every year brought a story of survival nearly as horrific as Blackburn’s. A year earlier, two men had been picked up by a South American trader after eight days adrift. They wound up in Pernambuco, Brazil, and it took them two months to get back to Gloucester. From time to time dory crews were even blown across the Atlantic, drifting helplessly with the trade winds and surviving on raw fish and dew. These men had no way to notify their families when they finally made shore; they simply shipped home and came walking back up Rogers Street several months later like men returning from the dead.

For the families back home, dory fishing gave rise to a new kind of hell. No longer was there just the grief of losing men at sea; now there was the agony of not knowing, as well. Missing dory crews could turn up at any time, and so there was never a point at which the families knew for sure they could grieve and get on with their lives. “We saw a father go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the ocean,” recorded the Provincetown Advocate after a terrible gale in 1841. “And there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the distant horizon… for some speck on which to build a hope.”

And they prayed. They walked up Prospect Street to the top of a steep rise called Portagee Hill and stood beneath the twin bell towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage church. The bell towers are one of the highest points in Gloucester and can be seen for miles by incoming ships. Between the towers is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down with love and concern at a bundle in her arms. This is the Virgin who has been charged with the safety of the local fishermen. The bundle in her arms is not the infant Jesus; it’s a Gloucester schooner.

AFTER Mary Anne leaves the Green Tavern, Chris and Bobby finish up their drinks and then tell Bugsy that they’re going out for a while. They step out of the barroom darkness into the soft grey light of Gloucester in the rain and walk across the street to Bill’s. Bobby orders a couple of Budweisers while Chris fishes a dime out of her pocket and calls her friend Thea from a pay phone. She and Thea used to be neighbors in a housing project, and Chris thinks she might be able to borrow Thea’s apartment for a while to give Bobby a proper goodbye. She wants to be alone with him for a while, and she wants to help Bugsy out if she can. It’s possible Thea might be interested in him—he’s leaving in a few hours for the Grand Banks, but you never know.

Thea says come by any time, and Chris hangs up and goes back to the bar. Bobby’s hangover has alchemized into a huge empty hunger, and they finish off their beers and leave a buck on the bartop and head back outside. They drive across town to a lunch place called Sammy J’s and order two more beers and fishcakes and beans. Fishcakes are Bobbys favorite food and he probably won’t see them again until he’s back on shore. The last thing fishermen want to eat at sea is more fish. They eat fast and pick up Bugsy and then drive over to Ethels. Chris has had a falling out with Ethel’s boyfriend, and Chris is going to move out everything she has stored there. It’s still raining a little, everything seems dark and oppressive, and they carry boxes of her belongings down one flight of stairs and pack them into the Volvo. They fill the car with lamps and clothes and house plants and then squeeze themselves in and drive across town to the projects on Arthur Street.

Thea doesn’t go for Bugsy; as it turns out, she’s already got a boyfriend. The four of them sit around talking and drinking beer for a while, and then the men have a terrible realization: They’ve forgotten the hotdogs. Murph, who is charged with buying food for the trip, won’t get hotdogs on his own, so if they want any they’ll have to get them on their own. They drive to Cape Ann Market and Bobby and Bugsy run into the store and come back a few minutes later with fifty dollars’ worth of hotdogs. It’s midafternoon now; it’s getting close. Chris drives them back down Rogers Street, past Walgreen’s and Americold and Gorton’s, and turns down into the gravel lot behind Rose’s Marine. Bobby and Bugsy get out with their hotdogs and jump from the pier to the deck of the Andrea Gail.

Watching the men move around the boat Chris thinks: this winter Bobby’ll be down in Bradenton, next summer he’ll be back up here but gone a month at a time, and that’s just how it is; Bobby’s a swordfisherman and owes a lot of money. At least they have a plan, though. Bobby signed a statement directing Bob Brown to give his settlement check from the last trip to Chris, and she’s going to use the money—almost $3,000—to pay off some of his debts and get an apartment in Lanesville, on the north shore of Cape Ann. Maybe living out there, they’ll spend a little less time at the Nest. And she’s got two jobs lined up, one at the Old Farm Inn in Rockport, and another taking care of the retarded son of a friend. They’ll get by. Bobby might be away a lot, but they’ll get by.

Suddenly there are shouts coming from the boat: Bugsy and Bobby are standing toe to toe on the wharf in the rain, wrenching a jug of bleach back and forth. Fists are coming up and the bleach is going first one way, then another, and at any moment it looks like one of them’s going to roundhouse the other. It doesn’t happen; Bobby finally turns away, spitting, swears, and goes back to work. Out of the corner of her eye Chris sees another fisherman named Sully angling across the gravel lot toward her car. He walks up and leans in the window.

I just got a site on the boat, he says, I’m replacin’ some guy who backed out. He looks over at Bobby and Bugsy. Can you believe this shit? Thirty days together and it’s startin’ already?

THE Andrea Gail, in the language, is a raked-stem, hard-chined western-rig swordfisherman. That means her bow has a lot of angle to it, she has a nearly square cross section, and her pilothouse is up front rather than in the stern, atop an elevated deck called the whaleback. She’s seventy-two feet long, has a hull of continuously welded steel plate, and was built in Panama City, Florida, in 1978. She has a 365- horsepower, turbo-charged diesel engine, which is capable of speeds up to twelve knots. There are seven type-one life preservers on board, six Imperial survival suits, a 406-megahertz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), a 121.5-megahertz EPIRB, and a Givens auto-inflating life raft. There are forty miles of 700-pound test monofilament line on her, thousands of hooks, and room for five tons of baitfish. An ice machine that can make three tons of ice a day sits on her whaleback deck, and state-of-the-art electronics fill her pilothouse: radar, loran, single sideband, VHF, weather track satellite receiver. There’s a washer/dryer on board, and the galley has fake wood veneer and a four-burner stove.

The Andrea Gail is one of the biggest moneymakers in Gloucester harbor, and Billy Tyne and Bugsy Moran have driven all the way from Florida to grab sites onboard. The only other sword boat in the harbor that might be able to outfish her is the Hannah Boden, skippered by a Colby College graduate named Linda Greenlaw. Not only is Greenlaw one of the only women in the business, she’s one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast. Year after year, trip after trip, she makes more money than almost anyone else. Both the Andrea Gail and the Hannah Boden are owned by Bob Brown, and they can take so much fish from the ocean that Ethel’s son Ricky has been known to call in from Hawaii to find out if either one is in port. When the Hannah Boden unloads her catch in Gloucester, swordfish prices plummet halfway across the world.

So far, though, Billy’s second trip on the Andrea Gail is off to a bad start. The boys have been drinking hard all week and everyone’s in a foul mood. No one wants to go back out. For the past several days almost every attempt to work on the boat has degenerated either into a fight or an occasion to walk across